Mongoose

Against the drive-side wall of the second house we had in Cliff Avenue, Mombasa, was a rectangular concrete box which, if my memory serves me, contained a water meter and a lot of empty space. A mongoose took up residence in the box and, since we had a problem with snakes, my mother encouraged it to stay by giving it the occasional hen's egg.

So, long before meerkats were popularised on TV wildlife shows, mongooses were special to me. Returning to Africa in the early 2000s offered the opportunity to meet these fascinating creatures again. These are two of a small group of banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) which visited the waterhole at Saadani Lodge. They're a widespread species, ranging across the savanna lands of central and eastern Africa, its main diet being beetles and millipedes.

This little gem, also caught at the Saadani waterhole, is a common dwarf mongoose (Helogale parvula) which can be found in a swathe of land from Somalia to Botswana. They feeds on insects,  lizards, birds, eggs, rodents, eggs, fruit and, importantly, snakes.

When we travelled to Namibia in 2009 I was in the process of writing a novel called Black Mongoose and I was therefore thrilled when, at a camp called Erongo, I was able to watch a single black mongoose (Galerella nigrata) come down to the waterhole below the camp's dining area. This very elegant species is confined to Namibia and Angola, and is only found in limited areas, so I consider myself very fortunate to have seen it. They have a varied diet - insects, reptiles, birds, small mammals and fruit - and are unusual in the mongoose group by being rather solitary beasts.

I had thought that the Namibian black mongoose was the only mongoose which is black but, to my considerable surprise, we spotted this beast in Makumi National Park in Tanzania in 2011. It's a marsh mongoose, Atilax paludinosus, a species is widespread in west, central, east and southern Africa. They are described as favouring wetlands, and feed off things like frogs and rodents, but this character was wandering, as is evident, across some very dry land.

Seeing more mongooses would be very high on any mental list I might make if I returned to Africa, far higher than seeing any of the so-called 'big five' again.